自由战士 英文原著｜第6章A

ON SUNDAYS the boys might relax a little, breakfast when they pleased, only they must turn up clean and shining in time to go to church with Aunt and Uncle and listen to the inflammatory Reverend Sam Cooper. Doctor Cooper was putting more politics than gospel into his sermons that fall and more fear of ‘taxation without representation’ than God into his congregation.

England had, by the fall of 1773, gone far in adjusting the grievances of her American colonies. But she insisted upon a small tax on tea. Little money would be collected by this tax. It worked no hardship on the people’s pocketbooks: only threepence the pound. The stubborn colonists, who were insisting they would not be taxed unless they could vote for the men who taxed them, would hardly realize that the tax had been paid by the East India Company in London before the tea was shipped over here. After all, thought Parliament, the Americans were yokels and farmers—not political thinkers. And the East India tea, even after that tax was paid, would be better and cheaper than any the Americans ever had. Weren’t the Americans, after all, human beings? Wouldn’t they care more for their pocketbooks than their principles?

Shivering—for the last week in November was bitterly cold—Johnny built up the fire in the attic. From the back window he could see that the roofs of the Afric Queen were white with frost.

A sharp rat-tat on the shop door below woke Rab.

‘What time’s it?’ he grumbled, as people do who think they are disturbed too early Sunday morning.

‘Seven and past. I’ll see what’s up.’

It was Sam Adams himself. When either cold or excited, his palsy increased. His head and hands were shaking. But his strong, seamed face, which always looked cheerful, today looked radiant. Sam Adams was so pleased that Johnny, a little naively, thought he must have word that Parliament had backed down again. The expected tea ships had not sailed.

‘Look you, Johnny. I know it’s Lord’s Day, but there’s a placard I must have printed and posted secretly tonight. The Sons of Liberty will take care of the posting, but Mr. Lorne must see to the printing. Could you run across and ask him to step over? And Rab—where’s he?’

Rab was coming down the ladder.

‘What’s up?’ said Rab sleepily.

‘The first of the tea ships, the Dartmouth, is entering the harbor. She’ll be at Castle Island by nightfall.’

‘So they dared send them?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the first has come?’

‘Yes. God give us strength to resist. That tea cannot be allowed to land.’

When Johnny got back with Mr. Lorne, Rab had Mr. Adams’s text in his hands, reading it as a printer reads, thinking first of spacing and capitals, not of the meaning.

‘I can set that in no time. Two hundred copies? They’ll be fairly dry by nightfall.’

‘Ah, Mr. Lorne,’ said Adams, shaking hands, ‘without you printers the cause of liberty would be lost forever.’

‘Without you’—Mr. Lorne’s voice shook with emotion—‘there would not have been any belief in liberty to lose. I will, as always, do anything—everything you wish.’

‘I got word before dawn. It’s the Dartmouth and she will be as far as Castle Island by nightfall. If that tea is landed—if that tax is paid—everything is lost. The selectmen will meet all day today and I am calling a mass meeting for tomorrow. This is the placard I will put up.’

He took it from Rab’s hands and read:

Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! That worst of Plagues, the detested tea shipped for this Port by the East India Company, is now arrived in the Harbour: the hour of destruction, of manly opposition to the machinations of Tyranny, stares you in the Face; Every Friend to his Country, to Himself, and to Posterity, is now called upon to meet at Faneuil Hall, at nine o’clock this day [that, of course, is tomorrow Monday], at which time the bells will ring to make united and successful resistance to this last, worst, and most destructive measure of Administration. . . . Boston, Nov. 29, 1773.

Then he said quietly: ‘Up to the last moment—up to the eleventh hour, we will beg the Governor’s permission for the ships’ return to London with their cargo. We have twenty days.’

Johnny knew that by law any cargo that was not unloaded within twenty days might be seized by the custom-houseand sold at auction.

‘Mr. Lorne, needless to say the Observers will meet tonight. There are private decisions to be made before the mass meeting tomorrow at nine.’

Johnny pricked up his ears. Ever since he had come to Mr. Lorne’s (and Rab said he might be trusted with anything—possibly with men’s lives) he had now and then summoned the members of the Observers’ Club. They were so close to treason they kept no list of members. Rab made Johnny memorize the twenty-two names. They met in Rab and Johnny’s attic.

‘Johnny,’ said Mr. Lorne, anxious and overanxious to please Mr. Adams, ‘start right out.’

‘No, sir, if you please. Noon will be better. That will give the members time to get home from church. And as usual, Johnny, make no stir. Simply say, “Mr. So and So owes eight shillings for his newspaper.”’

Johnny nodded. That meant the meeting would be tonight at eight o’clock. If he said one pound eight shillings, it would mean the next night at eight. Two pounds, three and six would mean the day after at three-thirty. It gave him a feeling of excitement and pleasure to be even on the fringes of great, secret, dangerous events.

Today he could not make his rounds on horseback. A constable might stop him and ask embarrassing questions. There was a law against riding out on Sunday for either business or pleasure.

The Reverend Samuel Cooper he ‘dunned’ as he was shaking hands with his parishioners at the end of the service. He nodded as Johnny told him that eight shillings were due on the paper, but a fashionable woman standing by said it was a fair scandal for boys to be intruding into God’s house and dunning a clergyman, and if collecting bills wasn’t work, what was? She would call a constable and have the ‘impertinent imp’ whipped for Sabbath-breaking. Mr. Cooper had to cough so he could pretend not to be laughing, and he winked at Johnny in spite of the dignity of his black clericals, white bands, and great woolly wig.

‘I’ll tell my brother William, too, eh?’ he offered. ‘Brother William and I will both pay you tonight.’

Johnny found four more of the members also at this meeting and then headed for Beacon Hill. At all the great mansions he commonly went to the back door, either to leave newspapers or to ‘collect bills.’ A skinny, slippery-looking old black slave in the kitchen told him Mr. Hancock was in bed with a headache. No, she would not permit Johnny to go to his bedchamber. So the boy went to the front door, rang the bell, hoping some other less obdurate servant might let him in. Maybe little Jehu. The old slave guessed what he was up to and got there first.

Might he not send a note up to Mr. Hancock? They wrangled a little and at last she said yes he might. She was preparing a catnip tea to send to the master. He could write a note and put it on the tray. In the kitchen he wrote his note—‘Mr. Hancock owes the Boston Observer eight shillings,’ folded it, and on the outside wrote, ‘John Hancock, Esquire.’ Was it only two months before he had tried to write those very words and failed so miserably?

The cook was squatting at the hearth toasting thin toast. Johnny lifted the teapot to set his note under it. That teapot . . . its handle was in the shape of a winged woman! Beside it was the creamer that he had loved so much. Even now he could shut his eyes and feel it in his hands. Ah . . . a sugar basin to match! Mr. Hancock had indeed found a smith to make it after Mr. Lapham failed so lamentably. Behind the cook’s back Johnny lifted it in trembling hands. The handles were wrong. Done exactly as Johnny had started to do them before he talked with Mr. Revere.

He thought with longing, but contentment, of that other basin . . . the one that had been exactly right and never completed. This one he held in his hands was nothing, trash. But how beautiful . . . how perfect, had been the other one! ‘If I had to hurt my hand, I’m glad it was while doing something worth while—not merely mending an old spoon.’

The cook’s wiry black fingers were in his hair.

‘You no-account! Don’t you never think to go stealing sugar in this house. Mr. Hancock is that generous I’d have given you a piece if you had asked politely.’

Next to the Hancock house was the Lytes’. Mr. Lyte, in his effort to play both ends against the middle, did take the Observer and every Thursday Johnny habitually crossed from one stable yard to the other. There was no reason he should do so today. But it was as he told Cilla—he just about couldn’t help watching the Lytes. What did they do on Sundays? Would the merchant be home today? He might have asked Captain Bull to dine with him. Would he see Miss Lavinia—or only the fat cook, the scullery maids, Aunt Best, or the stable men?

The cobbled stable yard was deserted. He did not hear the usual chatter from the kitchen. He glanced at the dining-room window—the one Mr. Lyte thought he broke the night the cup was stolen. Doubtless now that cup Mr. Lyte had actually stolen from him stood with the other three on the sideboard. His jaw clenched. Sometime, someday, he would get it back, and not by snitching it either.

A horse came clattering into the stable yard. Contrary to law and decent propriety, Miss Lavinia had been out for a gallop on the Common. Her black horse was wet and foaming. The young woman sat her side-saddle superbly. Her dark green London habit almost swept the ground. He knew that she had recognized him as the boy who had ‘stolen the cup,’ the very first time she had met him delivering papers at her house, but she pretended not to. Now she glanced at him and the chisel mark between the sweeping black brows deepened.

‘Williams!’ she cried. ‘Dolbear!’

There was no groom at the stable to help her dismount. The black horse reared. Johnny smiled. He knew enough about equitation to realize she was showing off. Johnny could make Goblin rear like that any time he pleased. It amused him that she pretended such contempt for him and yet condescended to show off her skill before him.

‘Well, you then!’ she cried to him. With her nervous horse and long skirts it was impossible for her to dismount from a sidesaddle without help. He gave her the help. She did not thank him. It was as if she knew that proximity to such famous beauty was reward enough for any boy or man in Boston. If anyone thanked, obviously it should be Johnny. He thought she was the most disagreeable woman he had ever seen, and yet the fact was he had slipped thus into the Lytes’ yard in the hope of seeing her—even risking Captain Bull and that threatened trip to Guadalupe. He liked to tell Rab how awful she was—and then would sneak back to take another look.

Near-by was William Molineaux’s house. Its seedy appearance advertised to the whole world that its owner was close to bankruptcy. Mr. Molineaux was standing in his orchard, shaking his cane at a couple of small boys he had treed in an apple tree. He had a terrible temper, which he thoroughly enjoyed. Although Johnny told him three times about those eight shillings, he was not sure whether the idea had penetrated the wild Irishman’s thick skull or not. Nor did he care.

His good friend, Josiah Quincy, plump little John Adams, and James Otis he found together at the Quincy house. They were still sitting over their port and cracking nuts. James Otis did not even look up when Johnny entered. He was hunched up in his chair, his thick-skulled, heavy head hung forward. He was busy drawing a row of little people on the paper before him. Quincy, having already heard about the meeting that night, put a finger to his lips and shook his head, at the same time glancing at the heavy, lonely figure of Otis. Johnny guessed that neither he nor John Adams wanted Otis notified of the meeting, although he was a member.

For four years Otis had been crazy and sane, turn and turn about, on again and off again. He was the most brilliant man of them all, thought in the largest terms, not ever merely of Boston; was passionate in his demand for the rights of Englishmen everywhere—over here and in Old England too. Now he was not even listening to what was going on about him. His heavy head was swinging back and forth. John Adams and Josiah Quincy were watching him so intently their heads were also moving a little. Johnny stole out and closed the door softly after him. He guessed that in a day or two he’d hear it whispered, James Otis had got into a mad freak and fired guns from the windows of his house: James Otis had been seen leaving Boston in a closed chaise with a doctor and in a straitjacket.

Next he went to Doctor Church. Here was a queer man surely. He was still in his bedgown and slippers, with paper, inkhorn, and pens about him, writing poetry. Johnny did not care for Molineaux because he bellowed and roared so loudly. But he disliked Doctor Church. He did not know one thing against him, but he felt the man was crooked, and he knew that Paul Revere and Joseph Warren felt as he felt about Church.

Doctor Warren was in Roxbury tending a sick woman. His wife bade Johnny come back at five.

–2–

Johnny had saved Paul Revere for the last because he lived at North Square and, being a Sunday, he knew that Cilla and Isannah would be waiting for him by the town pump. Guiltily he remembered he had not bothered to meet them last Thursday, nor the Sunday before, nor the Thursday before that.

He glanced about. The girls were not there, and secretly he was relieved. He went on to Mr. Revere’s. The silversmith was busy drawing a political cartoon concerning tea and tyranny. He did not draw well—not the way he made silver. As he drew, his children crowded about him, standing on the rungs of his chair, breathing down his neck, dropping crumbs of ginger-bread into his hair; but Paul Revere took all this confusion as he took everything else, without any fussing.

‘I believe I owe you eight shillings?’ he said, with a wide smile on his dark, ruddy face. The eyes gleamed.